Vantage Point

Lose the Crutch!

PowerPoint - leaned on by too many in the business world

By Angela Noble-Grange

The usual purpose of crutches is to aid the user in walking
while relieving weight from one foot or leg. The PowerPoint
crutch relieves the user of the weight of creating and delivering
a clear and compelling message directly to an audience.

How effective are your slides? Put them to the Triple E test. Your slides should:

Explain
complicated information. If you find yourself sharing a lot of information via numbers, consider using a chart or a graph to clarify the significance of those numbers. Data dumps don’t help an audience very much. You need to make the meaning of those numbers clear and sometimes a visual can do that very quickly.

Enhance
presentation. Use visuals to reinforce key aspects of your message. A combination of
words and pictures can enhance your presentation.

Entertain
audience members. It’s true that a picture paints a thousand words. Use visuals to elicit
an emotional reaction from your audience that helps you accomplish your purpose.

Come on, get out from behind your PowerPoint crutch and speak directly to your audience. Have the courage to
craft a clear message and deliver it. The next time you’re asked to give a presentation, turn on your mind before
you turn on your computer. Think through the purpose of the gathering and how best to get your point across.
And when you’ve done all that, ask yourself whether visuals will facilitate understanding by enhancing, explaining,
or entertaining your listeners. Throw away your crutch and stand tall before your next audience.

Angela Noble-Grange, MBA ’94, is a lecturer of management communication at Johnson, where she teaches oral communication and management writing to MBA and Executive MBA students. She also provides presentation coaching to senior executives in a variety of industries. Formerly the president of the Noble Economic Development Group, a micro-enterprise development consulting company, she was the founding director of Johnson’s Office for Women and Minorities in Business (now the Office for Diversity and Inclusion).

Are you one of those maimed presenters hobbling along depending
on your slides to carry your message instead of doing the work
yourself? The typical PowerPoint slide deck we suffer through today
creates barriers between you, your message, and your audience.
Those barriers then get in the way of audience understanding. And
the goal of communication is to reach understanding, is it not?
Then why is it that we can’t seem to present to a room full of people
and deliver a message mano-a-mano? It’s time to reexamine the use
of PowerPoint and give it a back seat to message understanding and
audience benefit.

But you’re a consultant, so you say: ”We can’t tell our clients
how to improve their businesses without PowerPoint. How can we
justify the time and money they spend if we don’t dazzle them with
charts and graphs and catchy buzzwords?” Or you’re an investment
banker, and you think you won’t be taken seriously without a deck
that can double as a pair of dumbbells for a serious bicep curl or two
once the presentation is over. And lest you brand managers think
you can escape my fury — think again. Your decks are prettier than
most, but you, too, hide behind them, reading slide after slide and
not revealing the point of your presentation until the very end, as if
the element of surprise is worth waiting for. It’s not. Your audience
wants to know what you’ll be talking about and why they should
listen. And they want to know early.

How do you know whether to count yourself among the maimed
and hobbling? I’ve compiled a telltale list of clues in my six years of
teaching and coaching people to become effective communicators
(to say nothing of sitting through hundreds of presentations over the
span of my 25+ year career).

The first clue is “slidenosis,” a condition clearly detectable in
your listeners’ faces and behavior. Slidenosis is a state of unconscious
compliance that occurs while staring at a series of slides containing
disparate messages, slide after slide after precious slide, as they begin
to wonder, “What am I looking at and why am I here?” In short,
your audience members stare at you, their watch, their Blackberry,
their watch, the slide, their watch.

A second clue lies in you, and your purpose in creating the
PowerPoint. Who are you designing your slides for? If you think
the visuals are there for your use, change your thinking. Now.
Visuals should be designed to help audience members understand
and retain information from your presentation, not to help you
remember your own material. Your audience deserves better than
that. You should know your material so well that if the LCD
projector bulb blew in the midst of your presentation, you could
still make all your key points.

The final clue lies in the slide design. Are your slides filled with
text ad nauseam, text that actually closely resembles the words
you are speaking? Crutch! How about diagrams — are there more
things flying around your slides than outside of Atlanta Hartsfield Airport? Crutch! When asked a question, do you respond with
something like, “I’ll get to that on slide 24”? Crutch, crutch, crutch!
If you want to watch a humorous and comprehensive presentation of
PowerPoint blunders, check out Don McMillan’s Life After Death
by PowerPoint (youtu.be/lpvgfmEU2Ck).

Am I suggesting you lay off of PowerPoint completely? Of course
not, just wean yourself from using PowerPoint as a crutch. If you
want to deliver a clear message to your audience, consider doing
your presentation planning sans PowerPoint. Ask yourself a couple
of questions before you power up:

What is the purpose of my presentation?

How will my audience members benefit from my message?

Once you are clear about your message and you know how your
audience will benefit from hearing you, decide whether the use of
visuals will help your listeners understand your message. To answer
this question, try the Triple E test for the use of visuals. If a slide can
enhance, explain, or entertain, it has a reason to exist. Otherwise,
it’s a crutch for you and won’t benefit your audience.

You don't mince words, you call it as you see it and you are right. I have been coaching and training professionals for speaking and presentations for over 20 years.

Like you I believe that PowerPoint is a crutch that impedes the speaker from allowing thoughts to flow and from making real connection. I don't use a podium/lecturn and I don't use PowerPoint, period.

You, as the speaker, are the only thing the audience can't get from reading a paper. They come to hear you, your stories, your ideas and insights. Give yourself to your listeners, give up PowerPoint and give up perfection. Let your thoughts flow freely and focus on making genuine connection.

I invite you adn your readers to visit my website and blog for some ideas on transforming the fear of speaking that is often teh reason people hold so tightly to PowerPoint slides. Thanks for your insights!